Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer, Marc Whitten, has confirmed that the company will release an update for the Xbox One. Photo: Reuters

When you’re first to the party, you don’t have a better time than the later arrivals. Usually you just fill up on chips and pretend you’re having a ball. But it’s only fun when everyone else is there, and the party’s in full working order.

Owning a Xbox One right now is like being the first guy at the party.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has now promised to fix that, though. Amidst complaints of buried applications, a confusing user interface and major difficulties on Xbox Live, Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten has promised that help is on the way. “You're gonna see us come out with an update where, well, we're going to fix those things,” Whitten told Engadget. There’s no specific timetable for the update yet, but Whitten also said Xbox One updates will be available more quickly than were Xbox 360 ones (which were notoriously few and far between).

Putting Microsoft aside, let’s move to Nokia. They’re launching a new Windows Phone (like it would be anything else?) on Verizon’s network. The development name is “Icon,” but that also seems to be the phone’s official name. It’ll sport a 5-inch screen (probably 1080p), a quad-core processor, and a 20-megapixel camera. All of those attributes are great, but the crippling feature of Nokia smartphones tends to be Windows Mobile - the OS hasn’t caught on in the U.S. or in most other global markets, so the Icon will have a tough go of it. Pricing isn’t finalized yet.

Last, let’s revisit privacy. A new app has just launched in the App Store, called “Confide.” The purpose of Confide is to keep your messages safer; recipients have to have the application installed to read any messages you send through the Confide, and once they do have the app, they’ll have to swipe along the message to reveal each word. The company claims that the messages are also encrypted, for good measure. Oh, and the messages auto-delete once they’ve been read, too.

Overkill? That’s up to you. Could be useful if you tend to text while inebriated.